Saturday, May 14, 2011

I am home and recovered from my trip to NYC with my mom and my sister. We had a blast!

Shortly after I got home I got to work on some pants for my oldest. He's so hard on pants, store bought ones just don't cut it. He needs double knee, pull on pants. I cranked out 3 pair for him last week but he will not let me take modeled pictures and I can't afford his bribery rates these days. He wants thousands of dollars for a photo shoot. Sorry son, I can't do it. Maybe I'll take a few pictures as they come out of the wash tomorrow.

This morning my husband took both boys to the Y for swimming and gymnastics fun. With some time to myself I cut out a new free pattern from Heritage doll designs that my husband printed out for me. You can get your own copy of the Drawstring Dress. I made this one out of scraps from an ice cream dress I made a couple of months ago.

I use different construction methods than what is described in the pattern. I like using my vintage Singer, "Aunt Millie." She can only go forward in a straight stitch so I'm not using any zig-zag or serger finishes. It is more time consuming but I love the finished products I make with Aunt Millie. I usually flat fell side seams but this time I decided to make a French seam because of the tiny 1/4" seam allowances. It worked well. I stitched them together, wrong sides together with 1/8" allowance. I pressed them towards the back.

I stitched again, right sides together to enclose the seam allowance. I pressed these to the back again.

This is how the seam looks on the inside.

I attached the armhole bias differently too. I ironed them in half and then only 1 edge was pressed up 1/4" to the center.

I wanted to take a picture of the binding getting sewn to the arm holes but my camera batteries had run out. Oh well. I went ahead and finished the dress while the battery was plugged in. Leonie, my Maplelea Girl scooped this dress as her own.

I added some narrow elastic to the inside to give it a nice fit. It was ok without it, but I didn't have any ribbon to match and elastic was a decent solution.